Nora Ephron quotes

Nora Ephron was an American journalist, screenwriter, and filmmaker renowned for her romantic comedies. Her sharp wit and insightful storytelling brought films like "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle" to iconic status. She inspired future generations of writers and directors with her humor and honesty. Here are 66 of her quotes:

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

Nora Ephron

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

Nora Ephron

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.

Nora Ephron

Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

Nora Ephron

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.

Nora Ephron

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.

Nora Ephron

When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

Nora Ephron

[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

Nora Ephron

Verbal ability is a highly overrated thing in a guy, and it's our pathetic need for it that gets us into so much trouble.

Nora Ephron

[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it - the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don't even wanna be in it!

Nora Ephron

Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist.

Nora Ephron

I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.

Nora Ephron

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Nora Ephron

If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.

Nora Ephron

The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you're not involved in any more because you've already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news - did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it?

Nora Ephron

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

Nora Ephron

... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read; but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I am truly beside myself.

Nora Ephron

When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match. - Sleepless in Seattle.

Nora Ephron

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.

Nora Ephron

I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.

Nora Ephron

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

Nora Ephron

Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape - of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category - is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men.

Nora Ephron